The whole line went quiet — even the rude woman, whose name I never learned and never needed to.
My mother stared at the box like it might contain something dangerous.
“I don’t understand,” Mom said. “Keeping what?”
The cashier — her name tag said Elena — came around the counter, and she was crying now, openly, in the middle of her shift.
“You don’t remember me,” Elena said. “There’s no reason you would. I was thirty-one. You wouldn’t have known my name. But I have thought about your face for nineteen years, and I would know it anywhere.”
She took a breath.
